When David Baldacci introduced private eye Aloysius Archer two books ago, the best-selling writer of crime thrillers says he did so in part to scare himself a little bit.

“I’ve written a lot of books over the years, and this is a way for me to get out of my comfort zone and try something I hadn’t before to challenge myself,” says Baldacci from his home in Virginia.

“I always think that the best type of writing is when you’re really scared,” he says. “It allows you to get a little bit of a chip on your shoulder, and you sit up a little straighter, and you think with greater clarity.”

Baldacci says he’d always wanted to write a book or series set in Southern California in the late ’40s and ’50s. In a career in which he’s written more than 50 books for adults and children set in contemporary times, Archer gave him that opportunity.

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“It was a challenge,” he says of the series that returns now with “Dream Town,” the third Archer book. “You can write about one character book after book, which I’ve done. There’s nothing wrong with that.

“But trying something fresh, it just really stimulates you.”

Darkness in ‘Dream Town’

In “Dream Town,” Archer arrives in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve in 1952. Three years have passed since the previous book, “A Gambling Man,” and Archer has grown more comfortable and skilled as a P.I.

“He’s got three years under his belt of investigation, really hardcore investigation,” Baldacci says of Archer’s work with his mentor Willie Dash in the fictional Bay Town. “He’s seen a lot over three years in the cases he’s worked.

“So now I’ve put him in ‘Dream Town,’ which is a pretty intense mystery, and things could go sideways really quickly if he messes up, which he does a couple of times,” he says. “The guys he’s facing are pretty tough. But he has a better chance now.

“If I had taken Archer, the guy in ‘One Good Deed,’ and put him in the middle of ‘Dream Town,’ he would have lasted like five pages,” Baldacci says. “I had to build that up.”

In “Dream Town,” Archer shows up in Los Angeles to visit a friend, the studio contract actress Liberty Callahan. In the previous book, the two realized they loved each other, but decided to just stay friends, and it’s through that friendship that the new story unfolds.

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A screenwriter friend of Liberty’s has disappeared, a dead body discovered inside her Malibu Canyon home, not far from the beach where smugglers are seen coming ashore.

The trail leads to a mysterious bar in Chinatown and a sad yet glamourous star who’s being blackmailed by a sex-and-drugs ring. As Archer gets closer to the truth, traveling to Las Vegas, and then Lake Tahoe, the danger he faces escalates.

“Drugs were in L.A. back then, it was a booming business,” Baldacci says. “These porno films were secretly shown. All that stuff happened. It’s not, you know, extraordinary.

“People of that age were just really like any other people.”

Fiction made real

Baldacci says he was excited to create the world of Archer because allowed him to indulge his love of history and research.

“What I try to do, I call it my battle plan,” he says. “When I first created the Archer series, it was going to be in the late ’40s. I said, ‘OK, what do I need to know to write, to put people in the late 1940s atmosphere?’

“So I basically spent a day in the life of Archer,” Baldacci says. “I got him up in the morning. I walked him through the entire day, and put him to bed at night.

“Everything he ran into, I had to figure out how to research and put together in my battle plan. The clothing, the cigarettes, the whiskeys, the types of businesses, the restaurants, the cars, how the law worked back then.

“All that stuff, I had to go out and research and sort of fill in the dots of what he would typically encounter on a certain day,” Baldacci says.

The Hollywood settings required less research, he says, thanks to growing up with an artist older brother who loved the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s.

“We watched all the movies,” Baldacci says. “We talked about L.A. and the golden era of Hollywood. I’ve seen more photos of Rita Hayworth than I can remember. I just sort of cut my teeth on that, and I’ve been fascinated by it ever since.”

Even so, he read books and articles, and scoured the internet for vintage documents and images, celebrating small treasures he found along the way.

“I found a vintage map on eBay, a fold-out map of L.A., Hollywood, West Hollywood, all the way out to Santa Monica and Malibu,” he says. “It was from 1952, which is perfect. I was like a kid in a candy store.”

When he decided to send Archer to Las Vegas, which at the time was little more than a neon mirage rising out of the desert sands, he hit a jackpot after hours on YouTube.

“I was thinking, ‘OK, what was the Strip like in Las Vegas?’” Baldacci says. “It was very rudimentary, they were just starting to build it. But I found a video on YouTube with this guy taking a joyride down the Strip in 1952. Like 27 minutes.

“I watched it probably 100 times, taking notes along the way,” he says. “They had just built the Sands, and right across the street was a pile of dirt.”

The writer’s work

Since 2020, Baldacci has published a pair of Archer novels, two more in his Atlee Pine series, and one in the Amos Decker series. He says he decides what to write based on pragmatism and inspiration.

On the practical side, Baldacci says he tries to publish a book a year when he first starts a new series.

“So that readers can get a foundation with the character, and get to know them,” he says. “If you’re going to introduce your series and write one book, and then four years pass and no books come out, the problem is they’re just not going to remember what happened in that first book, no matter how well you wrote it.”

Once that foundation is built, then it’s more a matter of feel, Baldacci says.

“Once you’ve got that rolling, then it comes down to out of all these casts of characters I’ve created, who do I want to write about?” he says. “Who am I really itching to get back to? Who am I missing being on the page with?”

Baldacci says he normally writes one book at a time. But the pandemic, which eliminated his travel, left him desperate to write and escape the endless stream of bad news.

This year, he’s got three books coming. “Dream Town,” which arrives this month, a new character and possible series in “The 6:20 Man” in July, and “Long Shadows,” the seventh book in the Amos Decker series in October.

“The books really for me were a cathartic experience to get away from all the (stuff) that was going on,” Baldacci says. “So during COVID, I wrote a couple of different books simultaneously, which I’ve never really done before.

“I had all this in my head, all these characters and different scenarios,” he says. “I would write until my tank was empty, and I had to really walk away from it a little bit and think some more. But at the same time, I picked up on another book and started to write that one.”

And there will be a new Archer book before long, though definitely not this year, Baldacci says.

“I started the notebook – I keep notebooks on every book project – and I’ve pored through written and picture books, thinking about the places I’m going to send him.

“He’s definitely going to be back in another adventure. In that time period, there’s just so much to write about.”

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